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a way to extend Windows without 'bundling.'
Published by Mike
21st March 2006
Windows Live - Microsoft's Antitrust Savior?
As the never-ending antitrust cases around the globe against Microsoft prove, bundling is still a bad word for the Redmond software giant. Microsoft is in hot water for bundling Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer, Windows Messenger and more into Windows on the desktop. And its inclusion of these elements, plus even more – a calendaring application, a photo gallery, various games – in Windows Vista could spell bigger legal troubles for the company in the not-too-distant future.
But going forward, Microsoft isn't looking to bundle all of its Windows features right into the operating system. It also is turning some add-ons into services. That's really what Windows Live is all about.
While few outside the software development community realize it yet, Microsoft is building a variety of hooks into Windows Vista and its successors to support these and future Windows Live services.
"Increasingly, you'll see packaged software that's 'Live-Ready,'" says Blake Irving, a corporate vice president with Microsoft's MSN unit. "This means software that is designed to work in concert with an Internet service. To deliver these experiences, Live-Ready client-side software must be capable of connecting to the Windows Live 'cloud' and must have the necessary plumbing and infrastructure."
Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Expo classifieds, Windows Live Search, Windows Live Family Safety Settings and Live services will be outside Windows periphery. And third-party companies will be encouraged to develop additional add-on services to Windows, too.
The result? Look, mom: No bundling! And no bundling means one less antitrust attack surface for Microsoft's competitors.
At least that's what we're betting the Softies are thinking. No one from Microsoft will publicly proclaim that Windows Live could evolve into Microsoft's antitrust cure-all.
But think this through: If government officials rule that Microsoft must un-bundle Windows Messenger from Windows, Microsoft would be less reticent to do so if it could simply deliver the same capability via a tightly integrated Windows Live Messenger service. Ditto with Windows Media Player and a streaming Windows Live audio or streaming video service. Or Vista's soon-to-be-unveiled Photo Gallery and a Windows Live photo-sharing service.
What's your take? Could Microsoft's "innovated innovation" strategy be taking a new twist with Windows Live? Will Microsoft's foes push for new suits that take aim at Windows Live? Or will Windows Live give Microsoft a way to fend off the antitrust police?
Funny stuff in my book this anti-trust litigation. I think most of us will have cursed M$ at some stage or other whether it be for percieved market manipulation/monopolisation or in frustration over what we might see as poorly written software. The simple fact is we continue to buy it in droves and few of us give a second thought to the alternatives. To me it has always seemed that M$ are a victim of their own success. For governments to percieve a need to legislate and/or litigate to prevent enterprises from being too successful has always seemed to me somewhat hypocritical in a democratic capitalist environment.
I don't think by any stretch I'm alone in thinking that M$ Windows desparately needs a quality competitor in the market place but for the life of me I can't see where it's going to come from. I initially held great hopes for Linux as an alternative but you have to hand it to the gurus at M$ they just keep coming up with a simple to use interface that Joe average can get down and dirty with quickly. Unfortunately I've found that the multitide of Linux distros don't go near competing for the average user which has to be seen as a huge feather in M$'s cap given that Linux is free.
OK enough rambling for one day. Just thought I'd throw my 2c worth in the air and see where it lands.
ust thought I'd throw my 2c worth in the air and see where it lands.
Straight into Bills pocket..... It's a sad sad state of affairs when everybody is happy to pay good money for crap because crap is all that is available....
Straight into Bills pocket..... It's a sad sad state of affairs when everybody is happy to pay good money for crap because crap is all that is available....
Straight into Bills pocket..... It's a sad sad state of affairs when everybody is happy to pay good money for crap because crap is all that is available
Sorry mate but I can't agree with you. I'm happy to pay for their products (XP Pro, MCE, Office etc.) because they work and work well.
We can hardly keep blaming M$ for the lack of credible alternatives, and since it's a corporate responsibility to maintain fiscal growth to keep the shareholders happy, if they do keep getting bigger because of range extensions and new products, I struggle with the idea that they are some kind of evil empire because they are successful at doing just that.
To be honest I don't see how they can win - if they give stuff away wrapped up in an OS shell they get pilloried for being anti-competitive, if they strip the stuff out and sell it via a subscription model (user choice) - they get whacked for being greedy - where's the middle (and acceptable) ground?
Sorry mate but I can't agree with you. I'm happy to pay for their products (XP Pro, MCE, Office etc.) because they work and work well.
We can hardly keep blaming M$ for the lack of credible alternatives, and since it's a corporate responsibility to maintain fiscal growth to keep the shareholders happy, if they do keep getting bigger because of range extensions and new products, I struggle with the idea that they are some kind of evil empire because they are successful at doing just that.
To be honest I don't see how they can win - if they give stuff away wrapped up in an OS shell they get pilloried for being anti-competitive, if they strip the stuff out and sell it via a subscription model (user choice) - they get whacked for being greedy - where's the middle (and acceptable) ground?
Interesting slant Mike. Personally I don't know too many who would agree with your appraisal of M$'s product functionality but that's a subjective argument at the best of times. The truth is that the bulk of what you are saying is precisely my point. For mine slapping M$ is definitely not the answer.
I have to disagree on this one. Market dominance doesn't equal good products and in the case of MS I fear it has just been too long now since solid software was available that everyone is beginning to forget what robust, efficient code was like.
Perhaps from a user perspective for the office product yes, people have been trained and come to accept that this software IS the standard.
The fact still remains and I would find it hard for anyone in THIS community to dispute that product is sold to the public in a far from ready state. In terms of quality control SOME elements of windows are the equivalent of having all 4 wheels fall off the car on your way out of the dealership.
Processor speeds have increased exponentially but the poor efficiency of the OS has continually consumed any gain for little reward in functionality. Windows is by no means robust. Robust operating systems require installation once and once only with upgrades for the continued life of the product. The majority of people I know can't go 6 months without a full rebuild of Windows. The installation time alone is astounding. 30+ minutes (+ hours for updates), to install a little over 1GB of data? How does that work on a drive that can transfer 150M/sec??
What about uptime? I had to reboot a Unix box recently with uptime just short of 1000 days.. You will never see that from Windows, hell, I've seen windows server farms schedule daily reboots just to quash the prior days memory leaks before the new production day begins.
It crashes, it runs slow, it's bloated, it's in-efficient, it's restricted (to developers), and it's tightly controlled by it's owners.
The discussion about anti-competitive behaviour in terms of bundled software is only the tip of the iceberg. The internal anti competitive work that goes into the OS core is where the real crime happens.
If you think about it this way, why is it that no-one has been able to successfully write a plugin or 3rd party code that can read and write word documents with the same level of reliability as Word itself?
Adobe give away PDF readers but try reading a word document on ANY other OS, you can't. Because it's obfiscated to the point of being rediculous.
Having 20+ years background in IT and seeing everything that has transpired from the zx-80 through C64->Amiga->AppleIIe->AtariST->IBMpc->Win311->up to server2k3 we really have made very little progression over the past 20 years. In some ways we have gone far far backwards as creativity is stiffled by a lack of creative tools. Windows is an "our way or the highway" prospect, MS are not interested in supporting the use a user wants, just supporting the use THEY want the user to have.
Sorry for the rant but I felt I needed to elaborate on my previous comment.
MCE is another perfect example of an unfortunate market where some pretty bad software represents the best we have available.
You can't totally blame MS for that lack of competition on competing platforms but you can certainly find instances where there is no competition within the platform due to MS not releasing updates to the developer community.
There is only one thing which I will congratulate MS for and that is their marketing. They wipe the floor with any competition on a regular basis and irrespective of how many law suits they have to fight they are unstoppable as a result.
Unfortunately that sort of successful marketing always seems to come at the expense of ethics and customer satisfaction.
I can see where you all are comming from and I agree with all of you in some of your points. The only way 'They' are going to improve their product is to have some competition. Unfortunatley competition is out of the question at this stage of the game unless computing dramatically changes.
We are rapidly comming to the limit of the silicone chip in terms of speed and performance. No doubt there will be some revolutionary product down the track that will change computing as we know it, and it may be at this time a compeditor might be able to step in and take on the software giant because everyone will start on a level playing field.
Until then, we will go on buying the latest OS in the hope that this OS will be different than the last! It is my belief that community websites like this WILL make a change, 'They' do see what we write and it will have to sink in one day!
After all, without mistakes, how can we improve? This community helps us to learn, vent our anger (preferably not via the front panel on our case ) and meet people with a common interest we would not normally meet. All of this thanks to That Software Giant!
It's not a reasonable comparison when you say that a Unix box went 1000 days without a reboot without knowing what it was used for and how often is was modified.
This site runs on a Linux box and up to six months ago when I hosted a number of websites on it and had my users installing and uninstalling scripts every day, it played havoc with the stability. On top of that, bad scripts from 100's of different authors including some of the major software developers had so many bugs, vulnerabilities and coding problems that you could almost see loads go up and down as the scripts were run.
Add to that the constant updates for Redhat, PHP, MYSQL etc - half the time when a so called "backwardly compatible update" was installed to thwart some newly discovered security hole, many of my users' scripts broke and they had to then get fixes from the developer to get their sites functional again.
Believe me, I'm not a Linux guru or anything like that, but when it came down to keeping a stable box running, and I did have a Linux guru running it for me - and it was frankly no better and quite often worse than my main Windows machine. Sometimes with only the traffic from this site showing as significant, my server load would average 3.0 to 5.0 and sometimes skyrocket to 12 or 15 and only a reboot would fix it! But since I got out of my hosting biz and this is the only site running on the box, with no new installations, no updates and no "tweaking" going on - the load now averages 0.24 and apart from some early problems with MYSQL - I've only had to reboot once in the last 3 months. So all is not completely rosy when the so called "clean and well coded" OS that is Linux gets some serious use and fiddled with lot.
Now if I compare that to my MCE rig - it works, I don't touch it, and whilst I used to reboot once a week, I haven't done it in 7 weeks - and it sings like a bird. As for the full rebuild of Windows, I agree with that, but why is it necessary? - because we install crap all over it 20 times a week and half the time, the program's (badly coded) uninstaller leaves a pile of junk behind in the registry and on the hard drive and slowly the system grinds to halt. Is that Windows' fault, maybe it contributes of course, but what about all the other crap coding that gets installed that finishes it off? Maybe the problem is systemic - that nobody really knows how to code properly.
As for "internal anti competitive work that goes into the OS core is where the real crime happens" - we come from different philosophical places there. I've worked in sales, marketing & logistics for quite a few medium to large companies over the years, and I've never known one to be willing to share its secrets with competitors. Why should they? - if it were my company (and I always work for them as if they were) - my only goal is to wipe the floor with my competitors and I wouldn't even consider giving them access to my internal information, plans or strategies, so why should M$?
And of course market dominance doesn't necessary equal good product - but relative to what exactly? How can we say that M$ products are so bad if they are the best out there - what are we comparing them to - products that are worse or products that we would like to see but haven't yet been born? That's like comparing apples to oranges.
Adobe might give away free readers - but try writing a document with it and you'll have to spend 100's of $$ to buy the rest of the program - and Word docs open, run and "save as" just fine with Open Office - I use it all the time.
Finally, "MCE is another perfect example of an unfortunate market where some pretty bad software represents the best we have available" - again I can't agree that it's "pretty bad" - it is for some but let's not forget that it's still an OEM product and many people here are living proof that if it's matched with the right hardware from the start it works just fine.
And you have to smile at this one - if MCE was perfect, we wouldn't be two good friends having this discussion and neither of us would have had the opportunity to meet thousands of really great people in this community - so we should unite and say "Thank You Microsoft for making such bad software" !!
I'll leave it there as I think we both have said our piece. The two sides of this argument will always exist. I'm just happy for you that you are one of the lucky ones that finds no issues with their machine. Ultimately that's what I want to be... Happy. Though I still fail to see why the purchase of a 50" Plasma has made me frustrated and angry... I'd have thought that would be a "smile on my face" experiece....
... I still fail to see why the purchase of a 50" Plasma has made me frustrated and angry... I'd have thought that would be a "smile on my face" experiece....
Cheers,
Arkay.
If it makes you so angry just give it to me, I'll be 'happy' to take it off your hands
As the never-ending antitrust cases around the globe against Microsoft prove, bundling is still a bad word for the Redmond software giant. Microsoft is in hot water for bundling Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer, Windows Messenger and more into Windows on the desktop. And its inclusion of these elements, plus even more – a calendaring application, a photo gallery, various games – in Windows Vista could spell bigger legal troubles for the company in the not-too-distant future.
It's a sad sad state of affairs when everybody is happy to pay good money for crap because crap is all that is available....
) and meet people with a common interest we would not normally meet. All of this thanks to That Software Giant!
